We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Now of course it’s true that the nature of home-schooling will vary family by family. That is precisely the point of it.”
David Frost, Daily Telegraph, warning about the move by the UK government to try and severely curtail home-schooling, which he correctly identifies as a way to enforce ideological conformity on the education of the young – something that the Left (and sometimes also on the Right too) has long sought. Frost writers about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
(For the convoluted way see here.)
All that is needed to end Britain’s debt crisis is for Nigel Farage to say this:
In the event of a Reform government being formed we will not honour any debt issued by the current government from this date forward.
This will have the following effects:
- No one will lend to the Labour government.
- The Labour government will have to live within its means
- The Labour government will have to make dramatic cuts for which they may or may not get the blame.
- If and when Reform come to power they will not have to worry about the debt crisis.
So, to summarize: it turns out that the “deceivers” were never the energy companies to begin with. Rather, New York City attempted to deceive the legal system by taking information out of context in order to name and shame American energy companies. While unfortunate, this activity isn’t surprising considering the City’s law firm, Sher Edling, is currently under Congressional investigation for its dark money financing and questionable ties to activist-academics.
– Mandi Risko
What makes one protest movement succeed and another fail? An article by Helen Pearson in today’s Guardian called “Stand up and be counted: six ways to protest that will make your voice heard” attempts to give a factual answer to that question.
Among its conclusions is this one:
A body of research shows that non-violent protests appear more effective than violent ones. “That’s one of the most robust findings,” says Mueller, who published a handbook for activists this year (The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists). But when authorities violently repress protests, it backfires and appears to strengthen movements.
Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, saw this in a study of the 1960s US civil rights movement. He found that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and shunted votes to the Republican party, which was viewed as promoting law and order. A wave of violent protests after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 even tipped the election to Republican Richard Nixon, Wasow concluded.
“Violent protests provoke a reaction in favour of law and order” seems an obvious point to make – though it never hurts to have some facts and figures to back up the obvious, as the work of Omar Wasow provided. In 2025 Wasow’s findings would be not be deemed controversial by most on the Left or the Right.
Not so in 2020. I knew that name “Wasow” was familiar. A little Googling found me this article by Matthew Yglesias from July 2020, writing in Vox:
“The real stakes in the David Shor saga”
On May 28, David Shor, a political data analyst, sent a controversial tweet. Soon after George Floyd’s death, alongside peaceful mass protests there was a substantial amount of looting and vandalism in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
The tweet was characterized as “concern trolling” by the podcast host Benjamin Dixon, while Ari Trujillo Wesler, the impresario behind a popular organizing app, denounced it as “anti-Blackness.”
The following day Shor apologized for the tweet; shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his job.
The crazy stuff didn’t end there:
. . . in fact, many Democratic Party professionals believe the backlash to his tweets was deserved. Indeed, though Shor has found a new job in progressive politics, one of the conditions of his employment is that he can’t reveal who’s hired him — lest his new employers face the same criticism Civis did. And all accounts of the internal situation at Civis confirm that clients and partners did in fact complain about him and his tweet to the company.
Shor’s tweet, as originally reported by Jonathan Chait, became a topic of discussion on the Progressphiles email list, a widely used networking list for progressive data operatives, and he was soon kicked out of the group. The group’s moderators described Shor’s tweet as “racist” and the criticism he got on Twitter for it as a “much deserved call in.” They also alleged that by arguing with his critics on Twitter, he had “encouraged harassment that led to death threats.”
Shor’s so-called “racist” tweet consisted of quoting factual research by a political scientist – one who is of mixed race himself. Shor’s aim in tweeting it was to help the Black Lives Matter protests and other Democrat causes be more effective. Why were the American Left in 2020 so desperate to believe that violent protest worked better than peaceful protest that they punished one of their own merely for pointing out the tactically useful fact that it did not?
Contemplating the errors made by one’s political enemies during a bout of insanity is fun and easy. It is much harder to spot the errors made by one’s own side due to it currently being the one with its fingers stuck in its ears chanting “La-la, I can’t hear you”. Any suggestions as to what People We Like are currently refusing to see?
Russell Roberts wrote this essay yesterday in response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles: “Profits versus Love”
A few years back we thought about building a deck or a porch on the back of our house. But we decided against it when the estimates started coming in. They were about double what the architect had told us it would cost. Double! Had the architect misled us as a way of encouraging us to proceed with the project? No, six months earlier the Mississippi had overflowed its banks and destroyed a lot of houses in the St. Louis area. Carpenters and builders had no time to build a back porch or a deck. They had bigger fish to fry. To get them to build a porch, you had to pay a premium.
We delayed the project for a couple of years, and prices came down. That delay was an example of the hidden benefit of high prices. When prices are high, the least-urgent projects get delayed, freeing up resources for more urgent projects. The porch just isn’t worth it. So the wood I would have used instead gets set aside to rebuild a washed-away house. The carpenter I would have kept busy now works on building that new house.
As you may have noticed, my claim that Russell Roberts wrote that essay yesterday was a lie. He wrote it twenty-one years ago in 2003. Unfortunately it might as well have been written yesterday because some people never learn. On 12 January 2025 the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, tweeted about measures he is taking in an effort to help the victims of the fires:
NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.
The responses are full of people making the obvious point about red tape. A lady calling herself “Orange County MAGA” says, “So you’re saying California has too much bureaucratic red tape? Gee, if only there was an elected leader who we could call…”
Criticism of Newsom’s “price gouging protections” is much rarer, despite the harm they do being more immediate and severe than the long-term harm done by excessive building regulations. That is par for the course. Patrick Crozier’s post from 2015, “People are ignorant about economics”, contains this anecdote from Mike Munger:
…there was a hurricane in Raleigh, North Carolina. The roads were blocked, there was no electricity and there was a shortage of ice.
Ice may not sound that important but it is. Not only does it help to preserve food but it also helps to preserve some medicines like, for instance, the insulin needed by diabetics.
Some “yahoos” – Munger’s term – saw an opportunity to make money. They got themselves a truck, loaded it with ice and some chainsaws and proceeded to drive towards the centre of Raleigh. If they found the road in front of them blocked they chopped up the fallen trees and carried on.
When they got to the centre of town they started selling the ice. Usually, ice sold for $2 a bag. They were selling it for $12. Very soon a queue appeared. Then the police arrived. Citing price-gouging laws they arrested the men and impounded the truck.
And here’s the kicker: as the truck was towed away the people in the queue applauded the police.
Here are some more posts from the Samizdata archives about how “price-gouging” helps people hit by natural disasters:
As Hurricane Milton makes landfall, a reminder about price-gouging
“The good news,” Cuomo said of the promised 12 million gallons, “is it’s going to be free.”
A Quote of the Day from Tim Worstall
Or check out the entire discipline of economics.
“The critique of private space companies by many on the left is frequently that those billions could be better spent helping the poor or other philanthropic goals. Of course, the Hayekian answer to that question is we don’t know. Predictions about outcomes based on investments are speculative, but there are two points in favor of the space billionaires overusing public money in the pursuit of opening up space. First, the billionaires have track records building successful institutions and seeing market opportunities. That doesn’t mean private sector investment is always right—take the Segway as a good example of that. But they have done it before…private money is much more agile and responsive than public money. When space exploration is driven by private actors and investors rather than bureaucrats, market signals will be received by people with a vested interest in acting upon them. Bezos, Musk, and Branson have experience with building on successes and ending failures. Bureaucracies rarely die and aren’t nearly as innovative as the private sector.”
– G Patrick Lynch
Of course, it is not just YouTube that cannot be trusted (which is why when I link to video content I expect YouTube to take down at some point, I tend to download it & upload it to BitChute), but this is a prime example of why.
“Another way to think about Elon Musk’s relentless attacks on Starmer – and apparent desire to see him out of office before the next election – is that he recognises the opportunity Britain presents, if it can only get its house back in order.”
– Marc Sidwell, CapX.
On 14 June last year, just prior to the UK General Election, I noticed parallels between the Labour Party and its stated aims and how matters unfolded after that party won power in 1964 under Harold Wilson.
An important event was the sterling crisis of 1967. And this week, we read of how the yields on UK government bonds (gilts) have soared – which means investors are far less confident in the country’s creditworthiness. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, now dubbed in certain quarters as “Rachel from Accounts” due to her questionable background details, is in China at the moment (interesting destination), and there is talk of how the UK might need to be bailed out by the IMF as it was in 1976. Even if this does not come to pass, the descent of this government has taken place with tremendous speed. We could be headed for a sterling and government debt crunch; there is widespread and justified anger about its handling of criticisms about the “grooming gangs” saga; the questionable decision to hand over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius looks worse by the day; the government is going after private schools and educational rigor more generally; one in five working-aged adults are economically inactive….and on it goes.
We are not out of the first half of January yet. “Hard pounding, Hardy”, as Nelson said at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Holman Jenkins Jnr, an opinion columnist in the Wall Street Journal, reflects on the mix of bad faith, moral cant and low protectionist nonsense that underpins so much Western policy on electric vehicles:
Subsidizing green-energy consumption is simply to subsidize energy consumption, including fossil energy. EVs are “strategic” only for China, to reduce its reliance on imported oil in anticipation of military conflict with the U.S. For the rest of the world, including the U.S., electric cars are a consumer technology, albeit a fast-emerging and promising one. Sensibly, they’re also a technology that should have been left to consumers and carmakers to adapt and develop without distorting handouts and mandates.
The result is finally in view: a colossal self-destruction of the Western auto industry, with Germany’s at the forefront. Volkswagen is in a panic about Chinese competition to the money-losing EVs that Berlin forces the company to sell. Germany’s export-led economy is in free fall. Its bellwether auto giant, VW, is pursuing its first-ever domestic factory closures and layoffs.
Likewise, Ford CEO Jim Farley sees his company’s survival in the U.S. threatened by Chinese EVs given the tens of thousands of dollars Ford already loses on each of its government-mandated electric vehicles. The author of Germany’s auto mess, Angela Merkel, is now reviled as an unprincipled bandwagon grabber. Don’t kid yourself. The same reputational fate is coming for Messrs. Obama and Biden. Mr. Biden’s EV protectionism is America’s admission of defeat. The U.S. went from “Americans must buy EVs to save the planet” to “Americans must be prevented from buying cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs to preserve a government-created domestic boondoggle.”
Jenkins also refers to the concept of “permission structures” and the malign legacy of the Obama administration. (He links to this article at The Tablet.) I like that term – it coheres with concerns about how an “administrative state” has evolved over the decades to impose policy outcomes at a remove from democratic oversight or the sharp and corrective blast of free market competition. Worth a read.
The UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, the think thank, has recently opined about “mission-directed governance”, which is a sort of automated paternalism (I discussed this offline with Paul Marks of this parish). The IEA piece links to an interesting paper about East Asia and forms of authortarianism.
Update: From Guido Fawkes today:
The UK’s electricity grid came worryingly close to blackouts yesterday – just 580 MW shy of the lights going out – in what independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter described as the “tightest day since 2011 or before”. National Grid ESO had to issue its first Electricity Market Notice of the winter, along with a third Capacity Market Notice, though the latter was quickly binned. No surprise that cold weather means more heating and energy…
A sharp drop in wind output combined with limited electricity imports from Europe left the grid scrambling to keep the lights on. Yet Red Ed is still pushing to fast-track planning permission for a wave of new wind farms — despite the inconvenient truth that these turbines have to be switched off when there’s too much wind and the grid can’t handle it. Meanwhile Labour is ploughing ahead with their plan to make wind and solar the backbone of our energy system to hit 95% renewable energy by 2030.
Further to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to see this comment by “MJuma2018” to a Guardian piece called “A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media”:
Part of the reason SM has become a source of news for many is declining trust in traditional media platforms including liberal ones that set out to subtly manipulate readers. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Who holds the media accountable for manipulating readers rather than reporting news? Should they also be held responsible for misleading/manipulative content like the Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden’s cognitive status?
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop on a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
I relieved my feelings by immediately following up my deleted comment with this one,
I just demonstrated to myself that even now, four years later, the mere mention of a certain electronic device that featured in a news story broken by the New York Post brings swift euthanasia to a comment on this website. Guys, stuff like that makes people lose trust in the media.
It was deleted too, of course. Dunno what quality to melt the censor’s heart MJuma2018’s comment had that my very similar one of two months ago lacked, but I am glad to see someone at Guardian Towers woke up.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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